Volunteers Help NASA Astronauts Record Lunar Flashes

3 min read

NASA Science Editorial Team

As NASA’s Artemis II astronauts zipped around the Moon in early April, they observed flashes of light caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. At the same time, volunteers for the NASA-funded Impact Flash project scanned the Moon with their own telescopes and sent their videos to scientists to share what they saw from Earth.

“We were incredibly grateful for the videos people submitted,” said Impact Flash project lead Ben Fernando, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The locations and brightness of flashes observed by different instruments at different locations together can help constrain the nature and origin of the impactors, as well as the craters they form. 

The Artemis II astronauts have splashed back down to Earth, so their observations of the Moon from space have come to a halt for now, but the Impact Flash team is just getting started. They need your continued help scanning the Moon to watch for flashes. If you have access to a telescope four inches in diameter or greater with video capabilities, your observations can make a difference. The more observations you submit, the better the team will be able to constrain the present-day impact rate on the Moon and how it changes over time. Instructions for making and uploading your observations can be found on the Impact Flash website.

In the future, the project team also plans to use your impact flash observations to study tremors on the Moon, similar to earthquakes. They’re called ‘moonquakes’ and they help us figure out what lies beneath the Moon’s surface.

“We are planning to send seismometers to the Moon to measure how the ground shakes,” said Fernando. “Your measurements of impact flashes will help us work out the sources of moonquakes we detect. This will help us work out what the Moon’s interior looks like.”

To collect data during the Artemis II mission, the Impact Flash investigators teamed up with several other groups of amateur astronomers, including the NASA-funded Kilo-nova Catchers, Exoplanet Watch, UNITE (Unistellar Network Investigating TESS Exoplanets), and Night Sky Network teams, as well as the Lunar Impact Flashes project, based at the National Research Council of Italy (IMATI-CNR). Thank you to all those who submitted data.

Grab your telescope and get started with Impact Flash: https://www.geodes.umd.edu/impactflash

The Impact Flash team acknowledges the work done by Institute for Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies-Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (IMATI-CNR)/Italy (E. M. Alessi, M. T. Artesi) to set up the web page and A. Cook (Aberystwyth Univ., UK) and D. Koschny (Technical University of Munich, DE) for data curation. The IMATI-CNR team receives funding from the Italian Space Agency, corresponding to ESA’s (European Space Agency) Lunar Meteoroid Impacts Observer mission.

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